Magpie Read online

  He smelled of freshly washed laundry. No cologne. His face was uncomplicated: a defined chin and boyish cheeks. Kind eyes. A smattering of sandy-coloured stubble. He had looks you could imagine ageing well and at the same time you could see instantly what sort of a child he had been. Underneath his T-shirt was a ripple of muscle, but it was muscle that didn’t like to announce itself. It was not gym-obsessive muscle, but the understated strength of a man who could, if required, be counted on to push a car whose engine had given out.

  In the cafe, Jake took quiet charge. He asked Marisa what she’d like to order, and then conveyed this desire to the waitress as if Marisa might find it too much bother to do it herself. She liked that. She could imagine Jas rolling her eyes at her lack of feminist outrage. Her tea arrived in a glass pot on a wooden tray with a rectangular egg-timer.

  ‘I don’t know if you’ve had our tea before,’ the waitress said. She had a tiny gold stud on the side of her nose. Marisa shook her head. ‘Right, OK, so you need to let it brew for three minutes to get the full flavour.’ The waitress turned the egg-timer upside down. Inside, the fine, black sand started to trickle down.

  ‘Wow,’ Jake said as soon as the waitress had left them to it. ‘That’s a complicated cup of tea.’

  Marisa laughed.

  ‘I’m more of an English Breakfast man myself,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, I can see that,’ she replied, playful but not too much.

  After that, the conversation came easily, passing between them fluidly like the egg-timer grains. They spoke about upbringings. He was the oldest of four, with three younger sisters, he told her. He was close to his mother, raised in Gloucestershire, ‘and still a country boy at heart’.

  ‘Do you go in for all those country pursuits?’

  He laughed.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone actually say country pursuits. I mean, outside the pages of a Victorian novel, that is.’ He looked at her, unblinking. ‘It’s very quaint.’

  She flushed.

  ‘Don’t worry, it’s charming. And no, not really. I’ve been to the odd pheasant shoot but fox hunting is not really my thing. I quite like … foxes.’

  He caught her eye and Marisa was left with the distinct impression that he meant to refer to her when he spoke the word.

  He brought up the subject of children. It was unusual for a man to mention it, even more so on a first date and given their age difference – Marisa was twenty-eight and Jake eleven years older.

  ‘But, you know, I want to be able to play football with my kids,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to be the only dad at the school gates getting his hips replaced.’

  ‘You’re not that old!’ Marisa said.

  ‘Well …’

  Jake stretched back, resting one arm on the table and placing the other on the back of his chair. He had an effortless capacity to inhabit a space. She liked the way he could have been carved out of blocks of wood.

  The cafe was beginning to fill with the thrum of the lunchtime rush: mothers pushing buggies and businessmen in suits and young women in glasses and cropped jeans carrying laptops in rucksacks. Jake and Marisa had to raise their voices to hear each other over the clattering of chrome chairs and hissing of the espresso machine.

  ‘To be honest, I’ve always wanted kids young,’ Marisa said. ‘I think I told you, my mum was twenty-one when she had me and …’ She let the thought drift, annoyed with herself for having said something she did not particularly want to share. She couldn’t remember what she’d told him on their first meeting and Marisa did not want to reveal too much. Her mind ballooned with an image of her beautiful but dishevelled mother, dungaree dress unbuttoned so that her breast could slip out to feed the mewling baby, and Marisa had to make a conscious effort to remove the memory so that she could return to the conversation in the cafe with Jake. Don’t go there, she told herself. Come back. You are here, right now, with this man. Do not fuck this up like you have done before.

  She took a breath and smiled and fiddled with her teaspoon.

  ‘I just think it would be great – a couple of kids, a dog …’ Marisa said and as she did so, she took a risk. She leaned forward casually and grazed his wrist with the tips of her fingers. She felt a crackle of energy, a fission of some sort, as if two molecules had collided and meshed and sparked into a new thing.

  Jake looked surprised. She removed her hand quickly and carried on talking as if nothing had happened, while all the time suspecting that everything had.

  Later, he will tell her that he knew from the moment she reached across and touched his arm that Marisa was ‘the one’. She thought the phrase sounded like something she usually put in her hand-drawn fairytales, but it turned out to be true.

  2

  She moved into the house on a day Jake was at work. She didn’t mind doing it by herself. She set up her studio in a small box-room at the back of the house, overlooking the garden. The previous tenant had used it as a makeshift gym, and when she unpacked her desk and her paints, she noticed a circular weight on the floor of the cupboard that must once have been affixed to a barbell. She used it as a doorstop.

  Marisa had ordered cardboard boxes and bubble wrap online, and she had packed all her possessions with fastidious care, ensuring each one of her favourite mugs was insulated from damage and hanging her clothes in the special containers sent by the removal company. Jake had told her not to bother with crockery. ‘We’ve already got everything we need,’ he said, and she noticed the casual possessive pronoun with delight.

  They had been seeing each other for a little over three months. The house had been smooth and easy as soon as they’d set their mind to it. She rented her little flat and it was easy to talk the landlord into letting her move out before her lease ended because he wanted to charge higher fees to someone new. It all felt to Marisa as if some benign deity had finally decided to smile on her.

  ‘It’s your time now,’ she imagined this kind-faced bearded man saying to her (because God, in her imagination, was always the cartoon childhood version, a version of Father Christmas but more serious and without the red clothes). ‘You deserve it.’

  Jas was less convinced. She had come over to Marisa’s flat for a farewell dinner of takeaway pizza and gin and tonics with not much tonic.

  ‘It seems very soon,’ Jas said, sliding a slice of pizza out precariously with two hands, threads of cheese stretching like saliva strings in a giant opening jaw. ‘You barely know each other.’

  Marisa, who wasn’t eating much, refilled her drink.

  ‘Yeah, but it turns out all those people who said it were right.’

  ‘Said what?’

  She looked at Jas, at her short, peroxide hair, at the glare of her eyes, the slant of her arrow tattoo along one pronounced collarbone, and she felt something she’d never felt for her before. She felt pity.

  ‘That when you know, you just know.’

  It was the sort of thing that both Marisa and Jas would have rolled their eyes at in the past. But meeting Jake had changed things for Marisa. She had realised lately that her friendship with Jas was based on shared bitterness – the resentful cynicism of the overlooked masquerading as brittle humour – and now that she had found the person she wanted to spend the rest of her life with, there was less common ground. She was like the Ready Brek kid in those old advertisements, the one who ate a bowl of the breakfast cereal and was lit up all day, except Marisa was glowing with love.

  In the flat, Jas glanced at her sceptically but then, sensing something in Marisa’s face, she broke into a smile.

  ‘Girl! You’ve got it bad!’

  Jas had grown up in Lewisham but she often broke into an easy American patter, as if she’d watched too much 90s TV.

  Marisa downed the rest of her gin. She shook her hair back, the ends of it landing with a soft tickle on her bare shoulders. She felt the
absolute rightness of this moment, of the exact movement she had chosen to execute. She felt her beauty, the power of it.

  ‘I suppose I do,’ Marisa said. ‘You’ll be next.’

  Jas shrugged.

  ‘I’m not that bothered any more,’ her friend said. ‘I’ve decided I like my own company, my own space. Why invite someone in to mess it all up, you know?’

  Marisa didn’t push it. She sat on the floor, cross-legged, taking the smallest slice of the pepperoni pizza and chewing slowly.

  ‘I just …’ Jas started, then hesitated. ‘You fall hard for people. Remember …’

  ‘This is different,’ Marisa snapped. She stood up too quickly, and felt dizzy, her vision pixellating. She took the remaining pizza slices still in the box and threw the whole thing decisively in the rubbish bin.

  ‘Hey,’ Jas protested. ‘I hadn’t finished!’

  ‘Whatever.’

  ‘I’m just looking out for you, Ris.’

  Marisa turned away from her, washing her hands in the sink. Her flat was made up of one big room divided into three smaller ones so that the kitchen and lounge bled into each other. The cold water calmed her, breaking off the sprig of fury she had felt begin to blossom inside. When she turned back to face Jas, she was calmer.

  ‘I know.’ She put the kettle on. ‘I appreciate it.’

  The evening ended earlier than it would have done in the past and Marisa realised, when she hugged Jas goodbye, that their friendship wouldn’t survive the next iteration of her life. She felt silently judged by Jas and she was uncomfortable under that level of scrutiny. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, not really. It was just that things moved on. People changed. Besides, she had Jake. She had the house. She had their future children. A family and a home of her own.

  In the house, the studio began to take shape. Marisa hung two framed original sketches from her first Telling Tales book. It had been written for a boy called Gabriel, and she had given him a knightly quest to complete, filled with princesses in flowing pink gowns and dragons breathing fire from inside hidden caves. She put her brushes in jam jars – there was a specific jar for each set – and on the shelves she lined up the lever arch files where she kept track of her orders and invoicing. Jake told her she should computerise everything and that he would show her how, but Marisa preferred the tangibility of paper. It was a way of proving to herself that she existed; that she left a trace.

  As a child, she had always felt so ephemeral, a will-o’-the-wisp expected to contort herself like smoke to fit in wherever necessary. She didn’t have a single earliest memory, but rather a jumble of images of walking into rooms and her mother jumping when she realised Marisa was there.

  ‘I didn’t see you, darling!’ was the refrain. She was always too quiet to be noticed.

  Her younger sister, by contrast, was determined to make herself heard from the off. She would cry throughout the night and Marisa got used to the sound of her mother padding across the hallway to get to the baby, rocking her back to sleep with soft tuneless songs. The next morning, Marisa and her father would sit opposite each other at the breakfast table and share conspiratorial looks as he prepared her toast, doing it badly and leaving gaping holes in the bread where the fridge-cooled butter made stubborn dents. She was always late for school, and Marisa felt cross about this, blaming her sister, this unwanted intruder with her furious, crumpled red face and balled-up baby fists. It was astonishing to her how someone so small could create so much havoc.

  Marisa was simultaneously fascinated and horrified by the baby. It seemed strange that this alien being had been squashed up in her mother’s stomach and had emerged, bearing only the vaguest of resemblances to a proper human, with skin so thin and stretched it seemed almost translucent. The baby’s fingers were tiny as maggots; her eyes cloudy like apple juice. And all the grown-ups were mad about her, this squalling newborn, who had no personality as far as Marisa could see.

  ‘You need your nappy changed, don’t you, sweetheart?’ Marisa’s mother would say, cooing and smiling and lifting the baby high in the air so she could sniff her bottom and then make a great show of wrinkling her nose. ‘Ugh. What a pong! You need a clean nappy, don’t you, darling? Yes, you do. Yes, that’s just what you need.’

  On and on it would go, with Marisa skulking on the sofa watching it all unfold with degrees of embarrassment and disgust. She couldn’t understand why her mother was talking to the baby in the first place, when it couldn’t understand. The whole thing seemed to be a display put on for everyone else in the room, whether it was Marisa or her father, or the neighbour who occasionally popped her head around the kitchen door, having let herself in.

  ‘What a cherub,’ their neighbour would say. She was a woman in her late fifties, with three grown-up children of her own, and a bosom that would spill out over a checked apron she apparently never took off. ‘Aren’t you a lucky older sister, Marisa? You must be so proud of this little munchkin.’

  ‘Yes,’ Marisa said, and then returned to whatever book she was reading at the time.

  Once, when the baby was a few months old and down for her afternoon nap, Marisa had conducted an experiment. Her mother had been sleeping on the sofa downstairs, limbs flung out gracefully, her patchwork skirt riding up her thighs. Her father had been at work. The house was silent, apart from the deliberate ticking of the grandfather clock in the hallway.

  In the nursery, the cot was pushed against one wall, with a mobile of brightly coloured elephants and beach balls twisting in the breeze above the child’s head. The window was fractionally open, and a ribbon of sunlight unfurled across the floor.

  Marisa knelt down by the cot so that she was level with her sister. The baby’s eyes were closed, its nostrils dark and mysterious like miniscule caves, the flesh around them frilling delicately as it took shallow breaths. Marisa always thought of the baby as an it, but her sister was actually called Anna. Anna and Marisa, joined by the pretty vowel sound at the end of their names, so that if you said them quickly one after the other it sounded as if you were laughing or singing.

  In the cot, Anna was stirring. Her pudgy arms started to wave slowly, the peony-pink hands clenching and releasing. It was as if she could sense she was being watched. Marisa waited. She wanted Anna to be awake. She needed it, for the experiment.

  The baby’s eyes opened. They were dark blue and had lost their earlier cloudiness. Anna’s pupils swam and then locked into focus on Marisa’s face, and the baby smiled, pushing her cheeks up so that they dimpled at the top.

  A few weeks before, the baby had been in her mother’s arms, peering over her shoulder. The baby had smiled at Marisa and Marisa had pointed it out in delight.

  ‘Oh, that’s not a real smile,’ her mother had said confidently. ‘It’s wind.’

  Sitting cross-legged on the floor of the nursery, feeling the roughness of the carpet imprint itself on her bare feet, Marisa was not sure if this was a real smile or a windy one. She wanted to see if her baby sister was like her. If she felt things in the same way as Marisa did. She seemed so alien, with her bald head and tiny fingernails, that Marisa struggled to think of her as a real, living person even though her mother insisted she must love her, unquestioningly, as an older sister should.

  ‘You’ll need to help us look after her now,’ her mother had said when she came home from hospital, the baby tightly swaddled in her arms. ‘You’re the big sister. She’s going to love you to pieces.’

  Marisa had a vision of being loved to pieces – scraps of skin coming apart at the seams and floating into the atmosphere.

  In the cot, Anna is starting to grizzle next to her toy bunny, her fingers crunching closed, then open. Earlier, Marisa had taken a pin from her mother’s sewing box. She had been holding it carefully in her dress pocket ever since. Marisa took out the pin.

  Marisa leaned towards the cot, slipping her hand through the bars, th
e pin pointing outwards from the grip of her thumb and index finger. Anna was still looking at Marisa, gurgling and wriggling. Her eyes were fixed on Marisa’s face. Above, the mobile shivered and elephants with jaunty bow-ties cast their dancing shadows across the ceiling.

  Marisa selected the softest part of the baby’s flesh, on the upper part of her arm. The skin there was plump, like the freshly baked loaves of bread her mother used to leave out for Marisa when she got back from school. Swiftly, before the baby could move, Marisa stuck the sharp end of the pin into her arm.

  For a split-second, the baby looked at Marisa with confusion. In that moment, she looked older than anyone Marisa had ever met, as if she understood everything in a single instant. Marisa drew a sharp breath. She wondered if she had been right all along, that this wasn’t in fact her baby sister, but a life form from a different dimension sent to spy on them and ruin Marisa’s life.

  But then the baby screamed. It was a howling scream, not like the usual cries of hunger or tiredness, but a catastrophic shriek of what Marisa recognised immediately as pain. Pain and upset and mistrust. The baby was screaming so loudly that Marisa felt a lurch of panic. She checked Anna’s arm. The pin had not drawn blood. There was instead a full stop of red, unnoticeable unless you were looking for it. Marisa put the pin back into her dress pocket. Her chest was tight with the feeling of having done something unforgivable.

  She reached back into the cot, but the baby flinched and Marisa realised that she was scared of her now.

  ‘Shh, shh, shh,’ she said hopelessly, trying to copy her mother’s intonations. ‘There, there, it’s fine. I’m here. We’re here. It’s OK.’

  But the baby would not be pacified and after a few more seconds, Marisa thought she was going to throw up. What if she’d ruined the baby forever? She only wanted to see what would happen. Anna was red-faced now, her eyes scrunched, tears blotting the blanket beneath her.